Are American Textbooks Tainted with Islamic Ideology?

A terrorism expert says textbook publishers are allowing pro-Islamic consultants to have influence over the content of what is taught in America’s schools.

Brigitte Gabriel, founder and president of ACT! for America, contends that publishers are teaming up with consultants who implement radical Islamic ideals into history and social studies textbooks. She explains that major publishers, such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Random House, Inc., permit affiliates of Islamic groups to write and produce textbooks that promote radical ideologies.

“One, for example, is Susan Douglas, who taught at The [Islamic Saudi] Academy — the notorious…academy in Virginia [that] wanted to commit Marxism and jihad and wanted to commit jihad against the United States,” Gabriel notes. “She was a teacher at that school.”

The terrorism expert tells OneNewsNow that a student at that academy was arrested for seeking to assassinate former President George W. Bush. Even so, a former teacher at that same school is counseling the publishers of Across the Centuries (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a 558-page textbook used in middle schools that contains 55 pages on Islam, less than ten pages on Christianity, and several pages on the Byzantine Empire. (See editor’s note below)

“The chapter on Islam accounts for ten percent of the text, while Christianity and Judaism are almost entirely absent,” Gabriel points out. “This book is taught in every single public school across the United States, in every state and city.”
The ACT! for America president laments that sixth- and seventh-graders are being educated on extreme Islamic ideologies, while other curriculum is neglected.

Editor’s note: Daniel Pipes, founder and director of the conservative think tank Middle East Forum, has written that the second edition of “Across the Centuries,” published in 1999, has a “really serious problem” in its “covert propagation of Islam.”

“Everything Islamic is praised; every problem is swept under the rug,” he wrote in 2002. “Homework assignments repeatedly involve mock-Muslim exercises [and the textbook] endorses key articles of Islamic faith.” He argued public school students should approach Islam in a “critical fashion,” learning both the good and the bad, both the archaic and the modern. “They should approach it from the outside, not as believers, precisely as they do with every other religion,” he stated.

The publisher’s website indicates the latest version of “Across the Centuries” was revised in 2003.